Rob Harvilla

Country Music is dense with intriguing moments, with silly asides and tragic flourishes, with grandiose sociopolitical theories and feather-light flexes of pure star power, with slow pans over sepia-toned photographs and sonorous proclamations from series narrator Peter Coyote, who is, indeed, named Peter Coyote. Anybody singing anything on camera is an instant highlight, whether it’s Dolly Parton tearing through the old folk song “Barbara Allen” or Dwight Yoakam crooning and then rhapsodizing Hank Williams’s “Lovesick Blues.” (“There’s a sentimental heartache to that song, but yet there’s still a raw-edged, kind of raucous, mud-in-your-eye, flipping-your-finger-at-the-world-because-you-feel-this-bad side of it,” Yoakam explains, and then croons a little more, and yeah, geez, he’s got a point.)

Mariah Carey’s fourth album is called Merry Christmas. It came out in 1994, the year after Mariah and Tommy got married. There are 10 songs, on the original. Respectfully, I don’t have much to say about nine of them. They’re lovely. They’re fabulous. One broader note: Mariah writes a lot about how Tommy was visibly uncomfortable with her biracial identity, and had Sony frame her as, essentially, a white artist, and an “adult contemporary” artist. Whereas Mariah was naturally, and shrewdly, drawn to more contemporary R&B and even hip-hop. In 1995 she’d collaborate with the Wu-Tang Clan’s Old Dirty Bastard on the hugely successful “Fantasy” remix, and this, too, is portrayed as an unimaginable act of rebellion. Tommy didn’t get the appeal at all: ODB was boisterous and calamitous and by no means an old-guard label boss’s idea of a modern pop star. Mariah saw what was coming. Her husband did not.